Recipes: Stir-Fry

August 02, 2017

“I now understand Jack and the Beanstalk,” my husband said, looking out at our bushy green bean plants in the garden. I expanded our growing space this year with galvanized steel beds so we’re growing triple the amount of green beans as we have in the past. I typically plant French filet beans but for 2017, I went for Blue Lake 274 and they are prolific. Every three days, my husband goes outside and picks beans. When he comes inside, he’s holding a colander full of green beans. We parboil them and keep them in the fridge to eat as is or to stir-fry or add to other dishes.

After about three weeks of boiled green beans, I was feeling a little desperate for something new. Along came Chitra Agrawal’s Vibrant Indiacookbook and there was a interesting green bean dish. I didn’t care that it was gluten-free and vegan. I just needed a new green bean idea. After trimming back our slender curry leaf tree, it bushed out big time. And guess what? Chitra’s recipe used curry leaf for a South Indian flair. It was a win-win situation.

June 09, 2016

This great recipe came about by mistake. I’d mistakenly thought that I had a key ingredient – bean sauce, for a recipe in Grace Young’s terrific Chinese cookbook, Breath of a Wok. But I went ahead and made the recipe and it turned out really really well. The reason was fermented tofu (fu ru).

The dish in question was a stir-fried clam in bean sauce. Yours truly swore that she had a jar of Chinese fermented bean sauce in the fridge. I looked and looked but to no avail. The recipe also called for white fermented tofu (chao in Vietnamese, bai fu ru in Mandarin), which I keep on hand as a pantry item.

What is fermented tofu? Sometimes referred to as “Chinese cheese”, fermented tofu is like a cross between camembert and blue cheese stored in a brine of rice wine, salt, and sometimes chile too. I’ve made it myself (there’s a great recipe in Asian Tofu on page 41) and buy it too. My favorite brands come from Taiwan and are sold at Chinese markets.

April 07, 2016

Many cookbooks are produced to be timely and of-the-moment. They inspire people to dive into trendy dishes or a celebrity’s personal recipe collection. In the publishing world, those are categorized as “frontlist” works that sell well upon release. Then there are “backlist” cookbooks that are crafted to stick around for years and sell steadily. Some cookbooks may straddle both categories if they’re constructed well. I’m a fan of both but my shelves tend to favor backlist books that I intend to keep forever.

Kian Lam Kho’s Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees is a backlist book that’s written and designed to inform you on a lifetime’s worth of Chinese cooking. It’s gentle and quiet, like Kian is in person. There is a ton of information to glean and I’ve yet to find enough time to totally immerse myself in it. Ingredients such as red yeast rice is part of the book, which appeals to my Asian ingredient geekiness. Maps, cutting techniques, regional explanations and little nuances fill the 350+ pages. Yes, there is photography too. It’s a book to own, read, and dirty-up.

November 11, 2015

I cannot remember when I last ordered kung pao anything at a restaurant. I gave up on it because the restaurant-style sauce was either super sweet or indistinct and there were often few peanuts. Peanuts are cheap and I’ve not known why some restaurants skimp or skip it.

I love the peanuts in kung pao because they offer texture and richness. The ideal kung pao sauce is hearty, spicy, tangy. A well-made kung pao stir-fry is serious tasting food – with blistered dried chiles and numbing Sichuan peppercorns. What I’ve described is the kung pao stir-fry that I make at home. It’s not rocket science and I typically use chicken.

While I was in Vietnam, Rory decided to eat less animal protein, shunning his weekly steak for lentils, tofu, or tempeh. I came home and he confessed that he’d been making dal, searing tofu, and tempeh with recipes of mine. We didn’t eat much meat before and now we’re eating a little less.

July 22, 2015

I made a peanut noodle salad for a potluck luncheon last Saturday and ended up with about a pound leftover cilantro. There were a lot of stems with little root portions attached and immediately, my mind went to something Thai. In particular, this spicy mixture which I’ve been making since the early 1990s. The original recipe came from Nancie McDermott’s handy Real Thai cookbook. There’s no chile because as Nancie wrote, this is an old style seasoning mixture that the Thais used in cooking before chiles arrived in Southeast Asia. The heat came from peppercorns and garlic. Everything was pounded in a mortar and pestle until smooth.

This week, decided to use both kinds of peppercorns and add coriander seed. I took the lazy day route and pounded the spices in a food processor along with several heads of garlic and a sizeable amount of cilantro. I whirled it all up with a touch of oil into a somewhat coarse, slightly creamy mixture. I had roughly 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) at the end.

I scaled back on the garlic but the flavor was pretty strong nevertheless. There’s usually no oil so it’s not a true Italian pesto, and not a chimichurri either. I wouldn’t dip foods into it. It’s a bold seasoning to keep around. You may be able to freeze it too.

What do with the pesto? Within the span of 24 hours, I came up with these ideas.